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Wikipedia blames severed cable for global site outage

Organisation investigating why back-up plans failed

The Wikimedia Foundation is blaming a severed fibre optic cable for an outage which hit its sites Monday.

The company said that the outage, which occurred from 3:18 PM to 4:35PM, left Wikipedia and other Wikimedia pages temporarily inaccessible as administrators worked to restore a connection at Florida facility.

After conducting an investigation into the matter, the foundation said that the disruption was triggered when a cable connecting facilities in Florida and Virginia was severed, blocking access to Wikimedia's database and back-end server systems.

The foundation said that the disruption occurred despite redundancy measures put in place by the foundation to maintain network access when a cable is cut.

"We do operate two 10 gigabit Ethernet separate fibres between the datacentres," Wikimedia said in its report on the outage.

"We are now working with our network provider to determine how and why we were impacted by that fibre cut when we are supposed to have redundancy in our network. We are still waiting for their full report."